I’m sure I’m not the only one who has to get creative when it comes to making their income go as far as possible.
Unfortunately, my income simply has not kept pace with the cost of living in this society. It’s just a straight up fact. There are so many hidden costs in how we live today. The only way around it is to be proactively creative and sacrifice some things. I am not a big proponent of doing without. Particularly when it comes to my family’s overall comfort. I really like having HVAC cooling and where I live, it is crucial. However, the cost of cooling our home during the heat season has gotten out of control. There was never really any guidelines to our HVAC use. It got hot so, we cranked the air. It didn’t matter if it was costing us far more than it needed to. We just wanted to be cool and figured the energy bill was just the price we had to pay to. Now, the HVAC use is a major target of our household budget savings. We put a bit of effort into making our home tighter so we could keep the treated air inside. A smart thermostat was also employed to precisely manage the HVAC use. This way, there was no more jerking around the thermostat setting or cooling an empty house. Finally, we took a stab at reducing the effects of direct sun heating. Our home is now equipped with specialized sun shades which greatly reduce the ambient air heating due to sunlight. The savings from these efforts have reduced our energy cost by over 15 percent.